A society where people are drawn close to one another - to serve each other and to understand each other.
“People often ask what causes crime. But they're asking the wrong question. Let me give a parallel from economics. If you ask, "what are the causes of poverty?" you are asking a really useless question. Suppose you discover the answer? Terrific! Now you know how to make poverty… The interesting question, the fruitful question, is quite different. And it didn't occur to anybody to ask this other question until late in the eighteenth century: "What are the causes of the wealth of nations?" If you can figure that out, then you can begin to imagine a time of universal prosperity…”
- Professor Michael Novak
But what is the opposite of crime if wealth is the opposite of poverty?
In a January 2002 speech Oliver Letwin suggested that the constructive force that is the opposite of crime has gone unnamed in the English language. He dismissed the possibility of ‘order’ being the opposite of crime because it is “no more than the absence of crime while what we seek is something that is in active opposition to it”. Mr Letwin decided that what he called the ‘neighbourly society’ is the constructive force opposed to crime.
The neighbourly society of right relationships
The neighbourly society, Oliver Letwin suggested, would be made up of people who give instead of take, who earn instead of steal, who create instead of destroy, who welcome instead of abuse, and who persuade instead of threaten. The desire to do these things is greatest when people are in ‘right relationship’ with one another. The neighbourly society is therefore:
”…first and foremost about the establishment and preservation of right relationships amongst persons. These relationships are not part of the world of natural science; they are man-made; neighbourliness is something that each of us has to learn and, in learning, helps to establish. This activity of learning and creating takes place throughout our lives, but especially in childhood and adolescence. Nor is neighbourliness something that we learn on our own, but rather in relationship to others – most of all from within our families, but also, as we grow up, from within the wider community”.
Close 3D relationships are most likely to produce the kind of constructive qualities that will help young people to escape the conveyor belt to crime.
Professor Christie Davies, a sociologist, agrees:
"The factors that ensure that most people are law-abiding most of the time are not the impersonal threats of the law, but the disapproval of other individuals who know them and their own conscience which has been developed through such personal contact in the past. Everyday life consists of government by men, not laws."
Relationism
David Lee and Michael Schluter have developed the idea of relational proximity to point towards the kind of relationships that will build one nation of security and opportunity for all.
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